4.88: Behind The Scenes

The back wall of the room was gone. Instead, the storage room stretched on, twice its original size, and a quick inspection of the shelves showed that this stock was magical in nature, magical potions and poultices and what looked like a shelf of enchanted medical equipment hidden behind a locked glass door. I wasn’t interested in any of that; I’d already surmised that this was probably how the more restricted and rarely needed medical supplies were stores, though this seemed like a lot more work than simply putting them behind another locked door. What I was interested in was the far wall of this room, which had no door in it, and simply opened into a tunnel.

A service tunnel, it had to be. There was no way that a place this secure from the front would have a back entrance that just anyone could wander into.

“Do you think our potion is in here?” Kylie asked.

“Huh?”

“You need a potion that contains pearls, right? I mean, probably? If we’re reading the prophecy right. Maybe it’s one of these?”

“Yeah, maybe.” I made my way to the tunnel at the back of the room, Kylie on my heels. She almost bumped into me when I stopped short, staring at the back shelf, right next to the tunnel entrance.

“What is it?” she asked.

I picked a dark glass bottle off the shelf, showing her the label. “This is Lilith’s Veil.”

“Okay. So?”

“This is the memory erasing potion that stops you from forming long term memories while you sleep.”

“The one you think we were dosed with.”

“Yeah.” I turned the bottle in my hands. “And now we know that Malas definitely keeps a supply on hand.” So, if there was any doubt about what had happened to us…

My hand was shaking. I put the bottle carefully back on the shelf. “Come on.”

“Remind me of our priorities?” Kylie asked as we pulled additional spare robes from my bag to completely cover ourselves in brown, like janitors.

“One: search for other service tunnel exits,” I said. “I’m pretty sure there won’t be portals and stuff in the service tunnels themselves. They’re the school’s emergency responders, so their tunnels are going to have as few points of failure as possible. We need to be on the lookout for any portals that lead to different areas of the school, anything we can find a way to turn on and gain access to from the other side, that doesn’t require a route as risky as going through medicine storage. Two: anything weird. I don’t think we’re gonna find an ancient mysterious books titled An Explanation Of What The Fuck The Janitors Are Doing on our first venture in here, but if we do find anything weird, we should make note of it. Three: while we’re here, we might as well pace and map the tunnels we use.” I pulled out a notebook to do exactly that. I didn’t draw the map, of course; that would take far too long and might be suspicious is someone found it with me. But years of pacing tunnels for Max had given me plenty of experience at his favourite mapmaking shorthand.

“Don’t forget priority zero,” Kylie said.

“Zero?”

“Don’t get caught.”

“Ah. Yes. Definitely.” Honestly, I… wasn’t sure what we’d do, if we ran into any janitors who saw through our disguises. Run, I guess? To the… school that they had complete access to and could find us in at any time? Confront them, maybe, and demand answers, and just hope they didn’t wipe our memories or kill us or something? “This plan is a bad idea,” I said.

“That’s what I’ve been saying! Come on, let’s start looking.”

We walked down the hall a little, turned a corner, and froze. A janitor was approaching.

“Act natural,” Kylie whispered to me.

“What’s acting natural for a janitor?”

“Shh!”

We walked closer. The janitor walked closer.

We passed each other.

The janitor didn’t spare us a glance.

I slowly let out the breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding.Our disguises had worked! Not that completely covering ourselves in brown fabric was a particularly sophisticated disguise, but still.

I paid attention to my body as we walked, waiting for the telltale tingle that indicated walking through a portal. It didn’t come. The tunnels were lined with rooms, mostly storerooms. The place was stocked with enough fabric, paper, spare furniture and other random staples to see Refujeyo through a decade-long seige. (Probably. I had no idea how fast Refujeyo actually consumed resources). Occasionally, we found a different kind of room. A bathroom. A large dormitory containing thirty bunk beds. Some kind of office full of desks with a couple of janitors wandering about carrying papers. A large stone room with runic patterns carved deep into the walls and floors, containing several dozen lit candles and a stone altar that appeared to be part of the floor itself, upon which a naked old man was chained with a red bag over his head.

Hmm.

Kylie and I froze in the doorway.

“Um,” I said.

“We should let him go, right? We have to let him go.” Kylie strode into the room, glancing around to make sure it was otherwise empty. “Can you pick locks?”

“If I could pick locks, this whole key saga would have been a lot easier!” I followed her in. “Anyway, those are big, heavy chains with big, heavy locks. Wouldn’t lockpicks just break?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know how strong lockpicks are!” She pulled the bag off the man’s head. “Hey. Don’t be frightened. Are you alright?”

He blinked up at her in confusion. He looked alert enough. Just confused. Malas’ blue magic was veined up one of his arms and in a few spots across his torso, but he didn’t seem to have any recent injuries. Not that I could see, at least.

“Who are you?” he asked in Ido. “Is there some kind of problem?”

“That’s a fantastic question,” said a vaguely familiar voice directly behind us. We span around to face a janitor. He was, like all the janitors, a vague pile of brown clothes. This one was taller than us, but not alarmingly so. There wasn’t really all that much to say about him.

Oh, except for the crescent-shaped dagger in his hand, nearly as long as my forearm and covered in runes. That was probably notable.

“How did you get in here?” the janitor asked.

“We were just… doing work,” I said vaguely. “Which we should get back to, so…”

“You set off all the alarms,” the janitor pointed out.

“Oh.”

“What are you doing to this man?” Kylie demanded.

“I really don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

I took Kylie’s arm. “We should go – ”

“Hey!” someone else called out. “We heard the alarms, what’s going on?”

“Haven’t you done the bloodletting ritual yet?” someone else asked. “What’s the holdup?”

The room was quickly filling with janitors. I tried to slip past them, when the janitor with the familiar voice gestured at us with his dagger. “These two set them off.”

“Who are you?” one of the janitors asked.

“We’re nobody,” Kylie said.

The janitor who’d spoken took a step back, visibly startled. “Holy shit. That’s the prophet.”

“The prophet-prophet?” someone asked.

“Yes, the prophet! Somebody get Reginald!”

“There’s no time!” somebody else said. “Malas could’ve noticed the alarm, we’re on a clock here!”

“How do you propose to solve this, then?”

“I don’t know! Oh, this is bad. This is going to ruin everything.”

“Where’s Reginald?”

“I’m right here!” the old man on the altar snapped. “If someone would let me up.” The janitor with the knife fished a heavy key out of his pocket and began unlocking the chains.

“Um,” I said. “What exactly is going on?”

“Fuck, that’s the familiar!”

“The prophet’s familiar?”

“Do you know any other human familiars?”

“Oh man, we are so screwed.”

“Calm down!” Reginald snapped in English, getting up off the altar. “We do not have time to panic. We can figure this out.” He glared at us. “How did you two get down here, and why?”

“Would you believe that we innocently got lost?” I asked.

“Well, you’re in disguise, so no, not for a second. But the kuracar might. Yes, that’s doable.”

I pulled the brown cloth off my head, as if that was going to help at this point. So did Kylie.

“Should I escort them out?” the dagger-bearing janitor asked in Ido. Kylie was watching him carefully, I noticed. Was his voice familiar to her, too? I was probably imagining it. I’d exchanged a handful of sentences with janitors in emergency situations, but the chances I’d heard this guy and remembered his voice were pretty slim. Maybe he used to be a shopkeeper or something, and I’d bought potion ingredients off him a lot before he became a janitor. That would explain why I couldn’t actually place the voice.

“There’s no point,” Reginald said. “They’ve already tripped the alarms. The kuracar is going to expect a trespasser and we don’t have another explanation.”

“If he talks to them, we’re doomed,” someone called out. “There’s too much at stake to mess around. Have the practitioner cut their throats and let’s just start again.”

“I’d rather not cut anyone’s throats, actually,” the janitor with the dagger said.

“Give it to me and I’ll do it, then!”

“Nobody’s cutting anybody’s throats!” Reginald snapped. “Not unless we absolutely have to. This is the closest we’ve come to success in centuries and it’s too big a risk to start again.”

“It’s an even bigger risk to let them go back out there and get us all killed!”

“Yes, well, I’m sure it won’t come to that.” Reginald looked at us. “I for one am very motivated to find a way out of this situation that benefits everyone and where nobody has to die. Does that sound like a good goal to you two?”

“Yes,” Kylie said.

“Absolutely,” I agreed.

“Can’t we just detain them until Malas gets here and let him wipe their memories?” the knife-wielding janitor asked.

“No, that just delays the problem. They’ll notice the memory gap, because today’s a significant day with the Pit reopening, and they’ll try this again because they won’t remember this part where I tell them on no uncertain terms that if they ever come down here again or do anything to draw the kuracar’s attention to us then I’ll kill them both without hesitation. You two got that?”

“Yes.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fantastic. So, here’s what’s going to happen. You, prophet, what’s your name?”

“Kylie.”

“Kylie. One of our people is going to escort you safely out of here, and you’re never going to mention this place or why you were here to anybody, ever, and you’re going to keep an eye on the familiar… what's your name?”

“Kayden.”

“Keep an eye on Kayden, and steer him away from all of this, too. And you’re going to have to do that because we’re going to detain Kayden until Malas gets here to investigate who was trespassing. We simply can’t give him nobody, that’s not an option. It’s way too suspicious.”

“What’ll he do?” I asked.

“If you’re convincingly innocent about the whole thing, he’ll just wipe your recent memory. It’s nothing to be afraid of. Completely painless and safe, you won’t notice. With Kylie around to remember to avoid – ”

“That won’t work,” Kylie said.

“I assure you, it will. Memory erasure – ”

“Yeah, yeah,” I cut in, “Malas uses Lilith’s Veil, it’s very reliable, we know. That’s not what Kylie’s worried about. The problem isn’t the memory erasure, the problem is that this is me we’re talking about.”

“If you erase Kayden’s memory and not mine,” Kylie said, “you’d be creating a time bomb none of us could control.”

I nodded. “I know Kylie. I know her well. If she’s using information I don’t know to try to control my behaviour and stop me from investigating certain things, I am going to pick up on that pretty soon.”

“And then he’ll just be more suspicious. And panic. And ask me about it, and when I can’t give him a straight answer beyond ‘trust me’…”

“I’ll assume that Kylie’s in danger. Maybe threatened or blackmailed or something, but most likely, given recent events? I’d assume that she was under a geas, and the geas was preventing her from telling me about it.”

“Kayden’s dealt with geases before, and it wasn’t a good experience. This, on top of the whole Cheryl thing…”

“Oh, I’d go for the High Council. I’d go for their fucking throat. I’d throw everything into finding some way to protect my friends from the Council who I’d conclude was ruining their lives, and since we were planning on investigating these tunnels, I’d assume you guys were in on it too, and I would absolutely not be subtle or cautious. If you take my memories of this, I will draw some very bad conclusions and make some very bad decisions, and there’s nothing that Kylie would be able to do to stop me.”

One of the other janitors spoke up. “I’m sure she could – ”

“No, no,” another one cut in, “they’re right. That’s what he’s always like.”

“We could switch them. We could detain the prophet and sneak the familiar out to – ”

“No, that won’t work. They’re in the familiar’s apprentice robes, he’ll know an apprentice was back here.”

The janitor with the knife spoke up. “Lilith’s Breath.”

I froze. I felt Kylie freeze next to me. I was pretty sure she’d stopped breathing.

“What?”

“Lilith’s Breath. The potion. It smells and tastes almost exactly like Lilith’s Veil. We switch them out, detain the familiar, and when Malas doses them…”

“That’s far too risky! He’ll notice!”

“He won’t notice. He can’t directly diagnose the effect of potions. If the familiar can convincingly fake a memory wipe – ”

“And if he’s caught, Malas will know it was switched. It’s too risky! If we have to choose, it’s better to start all over again than risk even the slightest chance that Malas finds out we – ”

I wasn’t listening to the conversation. I met Kylie’s eyes. Yeah, she’d noticed it, too. I wasn’t crazy. The janitor had sounded vaguely familiar when speaking Ido, his Ido accent far more flawless than when I’d last heard him use the language. But speaking the English potion names? I knew who it was. We both did. We’d heard that voice far too often, and for far too long, not to.

We moved as one, lunging for the dagger-wielding janitor. Several people shouted in surprise as I grabbed his arms and he dropped the dagger, not even trying to raise it against me (I’d known he wouldn’t), and Kylie reached for the cloth shrouding his head. We had less than a second before we were dragged back by other janitors, but the got her hand on the cloth and it came back with her, baring the janitor’s face.

He looked the same as when I’d last seen him. Exactly the fucking same. Well, no, not exactly the same; about a third of his face was missing, replaced by Malas’ magic. He was missing an entire eye, the one that had contained a spell the last time I’d seen it. He had that same kind of stretched-out mannequin look, the same endearing little wrinkle that always developed in his forehead when he was annoyed, even that same stupid fucking goatee on his chin.

Maximillian Acanthos scowled at us. “What was that for?” he asked.